Open-source News

In addition to all the GNOME advancements and KDE excitement with shipping Plasma 6 this year, other alternative open-source desktop environments enjoyed much success too this year... System76's Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution reached alpha form, Xfce 4.20 released earlier this month, LXQt 2.0 and 2.1 debuted, and other improvements too...

Tvrtko Ursulin with Igalia sent out a "request for comments" patch series today working on a deadline scheduling policy for the DRM scheduler that is used across different Direct Rendering Manager kernel graphics drivers...

Deadline Scheduling Policy Being Experimented With For Linux Graphics Drivers  Phoronix

BlepFX crunchrr, new free audio degrader plugin for macOS, Linux and Windows  Synth Anatomy

If you're ready for something different, I recommend this Linux distro to newbies and experts alike  ZDNet

Bluestar Linux is back with update 6.12.7: Firefox 133, LibreOffice 24, the 6.12 kernel, and more  Notebookcheck.net

Intel's Linux Performance Optimizations Continue Paying Off For AMD EPYC  Phoronix

Intel's Linux Performance Optimizations Continue Paying Off For AMD EPYC  Phoronix

As part of my end-of-year benchmarking and various historical comparisons, over the holidays I was curious to take a look at how the mature AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" performance has evolved over the past two years under Linux. Going off benchmarks I ran back at the end of 2022 on the same AMD Titanite EPYC reference server platform for two EPYC 9654 Genoa processors, I repeated the same tests using the newest releases of Intel Clear Linux and Ubuntu Linux for seeing how the performance has evolved.

The 4 most Windows-like Linux distros to try because change is hard  ZDNet

Why I Prefer a Tiling Window Manager on Linux  How-To Geek

The latest MX Linux turns Xfce into a desktop anyone can use  ZDNet

Cloudflare is ending 2024 by announcing a new open-source project: h3i for low-level HTTP/3 testing and debugging...

6 reasons why Google should switch Chromebooks from Android to Linux  ZDNet

The open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver had a rather great year with a number of performance optimizations landing, on-time support for Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage Xe2 graphics, early AMD RDNA4 support, multiple drivers having same-day Vulkan 1.4 support, the continued progress of the open-source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan driver, and much more thanks to the contributions of Intel, AMD, Valve, and other organizations -- even Microsoft's continued merge requests!..

The Best of Linux 2024: The 10 Most-Read Articles  How-To Geek

As a very interesting end-of-year change for Mesa 25.0, AMD is now using the ACO compiler by default for pre-GFX10 (before RDNA / Navi) GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Last week Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution debuted in alpha form while kicking off the new week is updated install media to provide a few fixes for this original from-scratch Linux distribution...

Updated Serpent OS Alpha Brings Few Fixes To This Original Linux Distribution  Phoronix

AMD's GPUOpen team managed to squeeze in a new Vulkan Memory Allocator release into 2024. As a reminder this is a easy to use/integrate Vulkan memory allocation library for both Windows and Linux systems with hopes of making memory allocation and resource creation more easier like with Direct3D 11 and OpenGL...